I just saw the article about all the music that got pulled down in January for “streaming fraud”. Something like 750,000 tracks? That’s wild.
So, if your music gets pulled for streaming fraud, they just take it down and withhold the royalties for the fraudulent streams?
I’ve never heard of a case where an individual rights holder got sued or arrested for “streaming fraud”.
Has anyone heard of that?
The only one I could find is Spotify counter-suing the dude that tried to sue them, and they just settled. And Tidal is under investigation for pumping up Beyoncé’s numbers, but that’s not like this individual streaming fraud stuff.
Nothing public from Apple or Amazon or Google… Except their dumb “code of conduct” agreement which is a big nothing burger.
I saw where Germany and Brazil shut down some “streaming farms”, but it was just a cease and desist, no one got arrested or anything.
They don’t seem to have any dire consequences for this yet, I guess it’s not a high priority for LE. Maybe they aren’t losing as much money as they claim, or are doing other shady shit and just trying to stay off the radar?
I don’t think the streaming services loose money on this. It’s just that the split between artists will be different so the ones that don’t cheat get less.
I don’t think streaming fraud (meaning paying for a company to artificially inflate your streaming numbers) is actually illegal, it’s just agaisnt the terms of all streaming platforms and will get your music removed, usually for good.
I dunno about streaming fraud, but one thing that annoys me is when some random track gets tagged as being co-created by one of my favourite artists and so ends up in my recommends, and all of a sudden I’m listening to some dodgy autotuned dancehall track.
While convictions are going up be hard, I would not be at all comfortable making a statement like that without the advice of counsel. Sure looks like wire fraud to me.
You might have to pay back all gains made with bots, but has there been any actual convictions? I mean it’s very hard to actually identify the source of fraudulent streaming.
The disrespect streaming services have shown to artists/creators is rapidly spilling over to their end users. The user experience of streaming services is an increasingly bewildering nightmare of fake content, adverts for shoes you already bought and algorithms that seem stuck on a loop of “if you like that, you’ll love this” bullshit that pretty much always seems to end in something you don’t like and would never have looked for, but somebody somewhere paid good money (I say good, most of it was likely stolen from artists) to have promoted at you.
Streaming fraud is just another part of the game of seeing what they can get away with in the new consumer-as-product cattle grinder economy.
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Does anyone here remember how record companies used to pay radio Dj’s to play songs on the radio to get them up the charts quicker back in the 70’s? It was rife. A backhander here. A backhander there. This sort of thing of thing has been going on a long time. Manipulation.
Here in Finland all of the radio channels are owned by a few big media giants and have set playlists as opposed to individual DJ’s. It’s all a scam, the same media companies have a stake in record labels and mostly just play their own artists. They also own TV channels and circulate the same artists on their own reality tv shows.
That’s what I was wondering.
It would take a lot of work to identify which streams were “fraudulent”.
Like, how many repeat plays constitute “fraud”? What’s the actual number? They don’t list that number in the terms of service.
There’s a few songs on Spotify I’ve listened to A LOT. So which one of those streams were “fraud”?
The only conviction I could find was in the UK, years ago. But, they were stealing credit card numbers to buy downloads. That’s a different thing.
Yeah, it seems to be more about just deleting anything they “suspect” is fraudulent. Besides individual governments issuing cease and desist orders to a few of those sites, I can’t imagine the FBI coming down on some indie band streaming their own crappy song on repeat.
I used to own a record store in the 80’s in Birmingham Uk. We used to get Reps from Emi and Polydor etc asking us to add numbers to the numbers of sales for freebies so that Gallup could push the records they owned up the charts. Thinking back it was so wrong.
It seems like it’s kind of the same sentiment now with the “streaming fraud” stuff. Since everyone is doing it to try and game the charts or whatever, just like back then.
Unethical? Probably.
Illegal? If it is, there aren’t many cases (maybe a couple) to show for it.
